Sony has acknowledged that the outage, since late Wednesday, of PlayStation Network is due to "an external intrusion on our system." Patrick Seybold, PlayStation's top spokesman, said the service was taken offline "to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services." Still no word on when the service will be available.

"We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience," Seybold said in an official PlayStation blog post. "We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share."

This morning, Seybold wrote that "it may be a full day or two before we're able to get the service completely back up and running."

PlayStation Network has 69 million registered accounts worldwide. More than just online multiplayer and access to the PlayStation Store and streaming video content are affected. Certain Capcom downloadable titles such as Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2, require a connection to the PlayStation Network to start up and be played. They are unplayable through this outage.

Seybold's full statement:

An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th. Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority.